Where are Minnesota's best deer hunting regions? Things to know ahead of the 2024 opener.

Last season’s warm winter helped the deer population, and that bodes well for firearm hunters anticipating next Saturday’s opener, especially in parts of central and southern Minnesota.

As many as 400,000 hunters are expected to hit the field during the firearm season, which concludes with the 16-day muzzleloader season Dec. 15.

Central Minnesota continues to have the healthiest and most productive deer population, and river floodplains will remain prime habitat for hunters in southern Minnesota. So far the deer harvest in the northeast region is faring better than last year, said Barb Keller, Big Game coordinator for the Fish & Wildlife Division of the Department of Natural Resources. The region remains the most restrictive area of the state. Harsh winters, in part, have diminished the deer population. Some, like Deer Permit Areas (DPA) 118 and 119 on the Canadian border in St. Louis and Lake counties, have a one-deer, bucks-only limit.

“Even coming off that mild winter, we further reduced bag limits in order to allow those populations to recover in some of those northern DPAs,” Keller added.

A glimmer of positive news has been hard to come by in the last several years. The number of hunters in woods and fields have incrementally declined, Keller said. So far this year, license sales were down 1% from 2023 (134,546) two weeks before this year’s opener, mimicking year-to-year trends. Archery sales, however, were up 2%.

The success rate for hunters is trending downward, too, she added, reflected in the 14% drop in the overall deer harvest since 2019. Last year, hunters took 150,365 deer.

Here are several other things to know ahead of the opening weekend:

The highest harvests in 2023 based on total deer (bucks and does) and volume of land area: